


And Make a Million Mistakes

by Flyting



Series: Hot Teacher / Single Dad AU [2]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Adult Fear, Flirting, Fluff, Gen, Hot Single Dad Ben Solo, M/M, Rey is Ben's daughter because Reasons, Teacher Hux, bb!Rey, modern!AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-03
Updated: 2016-11-03
Packaged: 2018-08-28 19:17:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8459851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flyting/pseuds/Flyting
Summary: Rey is late coming home from school and Ben is in a full-on panic. Hux helps.  “Is Rey there?” The words tumble out in a rush. “Uh, this is Ben Solo. Her dad.”  “Yes, I recognized your number Mister Solo. What makes you think Rey is with me?”  “She hasn’t come home yet, she’s always home by now.” Don’t think too much about home. About how before it was always my place or the apartment and now suddenly it’s home, my home, our home except for when Rey should be there and it’s just empty. He realizes suddenly that he’s pacing.





	

The number that Rey’s teacher had called from to set up their last appointment is still in his phone. When the clock ticks over to 4:00 and she still isn’t home from school he jabs the ‘send’ button with one finger, smearing nervous sweat across the screen.

Ben Solo had been staring at the clock for twenty minutes, only stopping to glance out the front window and once to dart down to the parking lot and look down the street to see if he could see her walking up. School let out at 3:30. The walk home was only ten or fifteen minutes. Even if she walked slow, or stood around talking to her friends, she was always always _always_ home by 3:45. Maybe 3:50.

4:00 stares him in the face, taunting.

Something’s wrong. Something’s happened.  
  
The phone trills in his ear as it rings and he forces himself to breathe, in and out, along with it. Everything was fine, Rey was fine, she probably just got stuck at school, or-  
  
“Hello?”  
  
“Is Rey there?” The words tumble out in a rush. “Uh, this is Ben Solo. Her dad.”  
  
“Yes, I recognized your number Mister Solo. What makes you think Rey is with me?”  
  
“She hasn’t come home yet, she’s always home by now.” Don’t think too much about _home_. About how before it was always _my place_ or _the apartment_ and now suddenly it’s _home_ , _my home, our home_ except for when Rey should be there and it’s just _empty._ He realizes suddenly that he’s pacing.  
  
“She left school half an hour ago, as usual.” Hux says. There’s a sound in the background like a chair scraping on linoleum. “Walking with a couple of other girls, I believe. Does she have a mobile?”  
  
“A _what_?”  
  
“A cell phone. Does Rey have a cell phone?”  
  
“No, I-“ _I can’t afford that._ “She’s _eight_ ,” he says like he hopes that is explanation enough. Anyway, what eight-year-old needs a cell phone?  
  
One who’s late walking home and whose father is about to have a nervous breakdown, apparently. “Oh, god,” he groans. He lost his kid. Nine months and he’s _lost his fucking kid._ Because he was too cheap to buy her a cell phone. Because that was a thing that eight-year-olds needed, like toothbrushes and bedsheets and shoes, and he had _no fucking clue._ What was he _thinking-_

“Don’t panic, Mister Solo. I’m sure she’s just stopped off at a friend’s house and forgot to tell you.” The crisp sound of Hux’s accent, like the clink of good china, drags him back to himself. There’s a firmness to his tone, a complete certainty that life will turn out the way he says it will because _he says so_ and somehow it’s exactly what Ben needs right now.  “Is there anyone you can call to help look for her?” Hux continues.  
  
Ben runs down his short mental list of contacts, most of whom are probably still hungover this time of day. Leia would come, of course she would. She’d be in the car in seconds, rushing over to help like a knight in a modestly priced hybrid, and then when they found Rey she would pack her up in the car and take her away, because mother knows best. Mother always knew best. Because _Ben I told you this would happen, I’m doing this for your own good -_ and he would see Rey every other weekend and Christmas if he was lucky. She would say _I care about you both, don’t you see that this is better, you have to think of what’s best for her,_ and she’d be right because after all he was a father for all of nine months and he _lost Rey._  
  
What the hell made him think he could do this?  
  
“Mister Solo?” Hux prompts, firmly.

Dad was out of state god-knew-where, their elderly neighbor who watched Rey in the evenings could barely walk across the hall let alone go on a manhunt. “I don’t- there’s- _no_.”  
  
 “Alright, then stay there. I’m on my way.”

  
  
Hux pulls up outside his apartment in a sleek BMW and a pastel shirt and tie, which really only adds to his whole ‘Walt Disney’s shark lawyer’ look.  
  
“I thought teachers made shit money,” Ben says as he climbs into the passenger side, stress making him brusque and unfunny. “Sorry,” he adds. “I’m a little…” he jitters a hand in a vague approximation of his mental state.  
  
“It’s fine, Mister Solo. I couldn’t very well go home with a student missing.”  
  
“Thanks for the help.” He means it. “Really. And you can call me Ben.”  
  
Hux says nothing, crawling the beamer back out onto the road. The car is spotlessly clean inside. Ben is halfway tempted to keep his feet off the floor-mat so as not to get anything dirty. “Adjust the seat if you need,“ Hux says. Ben finds the little lever on the side that moves the seat back, until it’s level with the driver seat and he’s no longer eating his own knees. “I didn’t see her on the way over here. Do you know where any of her friends live?”  
  
“There’s this little boy who lives in the complex that she plays with sometimes, but I stopped over there while I was waiting on you.”  
  
“And?”  
  
“And she was there and she’s fine, I just really wanted a ride to the store. What do you think?”

Hux pins him with an unamused stare that makes Ben feel about three inches tall. It was a ‘if that’s how you’re going to be I will turn this car around and we’ll go home’ stare. It was the same one his mother used to give him on road trips.  
  
“Sorry,” Ben mutters. “Sorry, sorry,” he adds for good measure. Breathes deep.  
  
“Under the circumstances, I think you’re forgiven. Can you think of anywhere she likes to play?” Hux picks up as if his outburst had never happened.

Ben points him to the dingy little public park a few streets over, the one with the creek that Rey liked to jump in and the slide where he’d gotten stuck and she’d laughed until she nearly threw up. Hux drives them wordlessly, without judgement.  
  
It was easy to see why Rey liked the teacher. There was something comforting about being around a guy who took charge so easily, like Ben could lay down all his problems and just trust Hux to get him through this. He hadn’t realized how much he’d wanted that, this past nine months- to just let someone else be in charge for a little while.  
  
“Mister Hux is mean sometimes but in a funny way, and he doesn’t really mean it so it’s okay. Mark was making stupid fart noises with his shoe during quiet reading yesterday and Mister Hux took his shoe and made him walk around all day with just one.” Rey had chattered, when Ben asked her what she thought about her new school. “And we have to be good all the time in class, like _all the time_.” She’d stared him down to convey the seriousness of this statement. “In Miss Becker’s class you got three warnings and then you got the time-out chair. I got the time-out chair a lot. But Mister Hux puts you straight in time-out and you have to write a whole entire paragraph with what you did wrong. Everyone is really good in his class because they don’t want a time-out. But I don’t mind because he doesn’t have favorites. Everybody gets in trouble, not like in Miss Becker’s class where Laura and Denae _never_ got in trouble even when they broke the rules right in front of the teacher.”

He thinks of Rey sitting at their worn kitchen table with the mismatched chairs, her short little legs swinging in the air while she ate. Oh god, he had to find her. The console clock already said 4:34. What was he going to do if he didn’t find-

“They do,” Hux says, unprompted.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Teachers do make shit money. The car was a gift.”  
  
Ben cocks an eyebrow. “That’s a _bad word_ , you know.”  
  
“I’m a teacher, not a monk,” Hux rolls his eyes. “And anyway, I’m off-the-clock.”  
  
That makes Ben shift a little in his seat, touched. This was off-the-clock? “Thanks,” Ben mutters.  
  
“I never asked- what is it you do for a living, Ben?” His name sounds like it belongs to someone else when Hux says it. Someone posh.  
  
“I’m a bouncer at a club downtown,” he looks away, speaking quickly to get it over with, and then, feeling the irrational need to explain himself to this respectable guy with his college degree and his fucking beamer, adds, “The money’s okay and the hours are great. I leave right when Rey’s going to bed and then I just sleep while she’s at school. It gives us the whole evening together.”  
  
“You’re very determined to do right by her, aren’t you?” Hux asks softly.  
  
“Yeah, I am.”  
  
The realization nine months ago had been like drowning. He was all Rey had. She deserved better than some - deserved _everything_ \- but what she got was him. He had to try to be the best he could, for her.  
  
“That answers one nagging question, anyway. I wondered where an eight-year-old had learned to throw such a solid right hook.”  
  
A brittle bark of laughter escapes him. “Yeah, she’s got a good swing on her for a kid. We practiced a little.” He doesn’t want to think about showing Rey how to make a fist, and about telling her that fighting should always be a very last option- that ninety-percent of his job was learning how to _not_ fight. He’s the right teacher for that lesson, at least. He’d learned it the hard way.  
  
“She’s been good, right?” They had talked about it. He reminded her all the time.  
  
“You would have heard from me if she hadn’t been,” Hux says.  
  
At the park they split up. Ben checks near the creek, stomping down hard on his imagination, which presents a hundred awful images of Rey floating face-down in the water, while Hux talks to the other kids on the playground.  
  
“ _Ben_!” He picks his head up out of the underbrush to see Hux waving one arm from the other side of the park. He is standing beside a little girl, and Ben practically runs over to him.  
  
“Tell Mister Solo what you told me,” Hux says firmly to a little girl in braids. She hunches her shoulders, staring at the ground.  
  
“Rey was walking with us, but her and Kylee started fighting and Kylee called Rey _trailer trash_ and Rey smacked her in the face and pushed her down.”  
  
“She called her wha-“ Ben begins, outraged.  
  
Hux cuts him off, “Where are Kylee and Rey now?”  
  
“Kylee went home, she was crying.”  
  
“And Rey?”  
  
The girl shrugs.  
  
“Maybe that way,” another little girl volunteers from the swings, pointing towards the baseball diamond. “I think she went over that way.”  
  
“Thank you, you did very well,” Hux says offhand to both girls. “If you see Rey, tell her to go straight home, her father’s looking for her.”

“Are you Rey’s dad?” the first girl asks Ben.  
  
“Yeah, I am.”  
  
“I told Kylee to stop being mean, but she didn’t listen.”

“It’s okay.” Ben says, his mouth full of cotton. “Thanks.”  
  
They walk to the decrepit old baseball diamond, where Ben often sees teenagers hanging out drinking in the late hours when he’s on his way in to work. Hux is nearly as tall as Ben is, and they cover the distance quickly.  
  
“That’s her backpack,” Ben blurts out, breaking into a jog at the familiar sight discarded in the dirt by the dugout. The pounding of feet tells him Hux is right behind. “Rey?” he shouts, his voice echoing through the empty stands. “ _Rey!”_  
  
“Shh-“ Hux hisses, holding up a hand.  
  
Once the sound of his voice dies away, there’s a soft wet sound from beneath the bleachers.  
  
“Rey?” Ben calls around the corner. “Are you okay?”  
  
Another quiet sound, like crying. “I’m not going home,” Rey says, sullenly.  
  
At the sound of her voice, Ben’s knees nearly buckle from relief. “Rey.”  
  
“Go away, just leave me alone.”

“Rey stop it, please-“  
  
“No! I’m not going-“  
  
“Rey,” Hux interrupts, his voice quiet but firm. “Come here, now.”  
  
There’s a dull scuffling sound and the little girl reluctantly emerges from under the rusted bleachers. She trudges until she stops short in front of them, her eyes downcast.  
  
“Your father and I have been out looking for you. We were both very worried.”  
  
“Sorry,” Rey mutters.

She gives a big sniff and scrubs at one eye with the back of her hand. Shrugs. For the first time, Ben notices that her hair is soft brown hair is down, hanging loose down around her shoulders.

“What happened to your hair, midget?” Ben asks gently.

He had put it up for her that morning, trying to emulate a picture she showed him on the computer, but he’d fucked it all up somehow and instead of a fancy cascading twist the end result had been a trio of lumpy buns like horns. But Rey had laughed and said that she liked them, so he didn’t feel too awful about making a mess of things.

“It looked stupid,” Rey sniffs again. “Kylee Fleming said.”  
  
“I am going to have a _word_ with Kylee Fleming on Monday,” Hux growls.  
  
“Why didn’t you come home, Rey? I was freaking out.” Even as he says it he feels the _relief_. It’s improper, right now, where he needs to be stern and serious and let Rey know that this sort of thing is _not okay,_ but he could cry, he really could. She’s okay, she’s fine, she’s right in front of him- They’re together, which means everything is going to be okay.

“I didn’t want to get in trouble. You said no more fighting or I’d get expelled.”

“I know I did,” Ben sighs. “But Rey, running away is _worse_ than fighting. You could have gotten hurt, you could have…” he trails off, uncertain.  
  
“Sorry,” Rey says again, pitifully.  
  
Ben rubs the long bridge of his nose. “Come on, we’ll talk about it at home. Go get your backpack.”  
  
“Do you need a ride? It’s no trouble,” Hux offers once Rey trudges off.  
  
Ben considers. He already feels guilty for putting Hux out for this long, and besides… “It’s okay. I think maybe a walk will be good?”  
  
“Of course. Since it happened after school hours and off the property, I doubt anything will come of the fighting, but I will have a word with the principal just in case."  
  
"Thanks," Ben says sincerely. "Thank you, really. I think you're the first person who..." he trails off, not sure of what he's trying to say, except for the fact that Hux is the only person from the school or anywhere else who doesn't look at him like they're just waiting for him to fail at this, an 'I told you so' already prepared.  
  
Hux watches him appraisingly. “If I may say so, Mister Solo, I think you’re doing just fine.”  
  
A strangled laugh escapes him. “Yeah, just great for someone who has no idea what he’s doing.” The aftermath of all that adrenaline makes his legs feel shaky. Like stepping off a roller coaster.

“May I tell you a secret, Mister Solo?”  
  
“Only if you stop calling me _Mister Solo_.”  
  
Hux smiles, just the barest twinge at the corner of his mouth. “ _Ben,_ then,” and Ben wonders, briefly, if he only said that she he could hear his name in that soft accent again. The relief is making him stupid. “I don’t care for children.”  
  
“Come again?”  
  
“I don’t care for children. I never have.”  
  
“…okay.” Ben says.  
  
“Don’t misjudge me- I don’t _hate_ children. They are endless possibility. Everything is still ahead of them. They see the truth of you, always, and they’re never afraid to tell you the complete and unadulterated truth. It’s refreshing. But I have never enjoyed being around them.”  
  
“And you’re a teacher because…”  
  
“Because my father is the superintendent of schools.” Hux says baldly. “I was never really given much choice in career paths. The point, _Ben,_ is that it is crucially important for me to _seem_ like I love their sticky little faces, for at least eight hours at a stretch. And because I seem to enjoy it, everyone assumes that I do.”  
  
Ben considers this for a minute. “Is that a really wordy way of saying ‘fake it till you make it’?”  
  
Hux smiles. “More or less. You don’t have to know what you’re doing. In my experience, most parents don’t. At least you’re honest enough to admit it. The point is that you appear to be in control. Scream internally all you like, so long as you look perfectly calm.”  
  
Ben shakes his head, laughing, “I’ll keep that in mind.”  
  
“Especially the screaming internally part.”  
  
“Definitely that part. I’ve got that part down. Thanks, Hux.”  
  
It occurs to Ben that he has no idea what Hux’s first name is a split second before the man says, “It’s Armitage, _Ben_.”


End file.
